WASHINGTON, D.C., March 6, 2012, (LifeSiteNews.com)—While President Barack Obama andKathleen Sebelius claim contraceptives can lower health care costs, influential environmentalist activists say birth control may save the world from the scourge of global warming. At a think tank conference last week, activists promoted Agenda 21 and United Nations climate change meetings, claiming that promotion of lower fertility rates “trumps almost anything else” and that the average 14-year-old girl “needs to know how to have” sex “for her pleasure.”

The Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars held the hearing, “Women’s Health: Key to Climate Adaptation Strategies”last Tuesday. Participants asked, “Can family planning and reproductive health be recognized as a legitimate climate adaptation method?”

Kavita Ramdas, the executive director for the Program on Social Entrepreneurship at Stanford University, cited two recent studies funded by the Hewlett Foundation claiming “that empowering women to time their pregnancies would reduce carbon emissions significantly, providing 8-15 percent of the reductions necessary to avoid dangerous climate change.”

But Ramdas, who serves on the board of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, said global population control had fallen on hard times in the current political environment. “Not a single person in the presidential primaries for the Republican position of president is willing to even get behind contraception, much less get behind the notion of any discussion of population,” she said.

This resistance to abortion and contraception at home hindered international attempts to craft “a thoughtful and active strategy around making contraception available to communities around the globe.”

She said, “If we are in the situation in the United States where the Catholic bishops and others, actually a large number of evangelicals, truly believe that somehow [policies] – not forcing somebody who doesn’t believe it to take birth control – but simply paying for it is somehow a moral travesty with the kind of outrage we’ve seen over the last few weeks, we are not going to be in a position to make sure that that kind of provision exists internationally.”

Developments in the American political scene proved, in her estimation, that “you can’t discuss…access to contraception…without feeling that you somehow will get pulled into a discussion, debate, argument, around abortion.” She stated environmentalists “will be quickly slammed” with an allegation that “this is about population control,” a belief she says is “not completely without justification.”

However, she promptly raised that subject by praising President Bill Clinton for repealing the Mexico City policy, which she referred to as the “Global Gag Rule.” The ban, instituted by President Ronald Reagan, barred U.S. funds from promoting abortion abroad. “Why have we gotten to a point in 2012 where we even have to have that discussion?” she asked.

Myron Ebell, director of the Center for Energy and the Environment at the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) told LifeSiteNews.com that the “more radical elements” of “the global warming movement have been concentrating on population for a long time.”

He recalled two of the early environmentalist groups were Zero Population Growth and Negative Population Growth. Neither one became a mass movement, lacking popular appeal.
“I think that the environmental movement, if you polled the leadership and the staff of the various organizations, most of them would believe the world needs very serious population control,” he said. “It’s a logical part of the movement. Human beings are a blight on the planet, so the fewer human beings the better.”

Despite the long linkage of environmentalism and population control, it remains little known in the mainstream media. “The global warming alarmist camp has tried to keep this argument under wraps,” Ebell said, “because they don’t want to antagonize even more people than they’ve already antagonized with their policies.”

Ramdas proved unafraid of a backlash, complaining that the American view that young teenagers are unprepared for sex undermines international efforts to teach sex education.
“A sexually active 14-year-old or 16-year-old as any of you who have teenage children can attest to, is full of her own sexuality,” she said.

A young teen “is not just some innocent waiting to be raped” but “has sexual feelings, has sexual desires, is interested in sex, wants to have it, and needs to know how to have it in ways that are good for her health, for her pleasure, and to understand that that sexuality is as true for young men of her age,” she said. “This is not something we want to discuss, so sex education is also off the table.”